My nightmare of being a victim of credit card fraud.

Imagine my shock today when one of my credit cards was declined! I was way under my limit and I never pay my bills late and yet – I couldn’t pay for my propane with this worthless piece of plastic.

I called my credit card company and after waiting on hold for more than 1/2 hour I learned my account was closed due to massive fraudulent activities overseas. I hung up the phone in shock.

How could this happen to me? I shred or burn personal papers, I lock down everything personal, I have no less than 4 virus programs and 5 spyware programs running on all of my computers at all times, I scan everything carefully before I open it. How could this happen TO ME?

Since this is a card that I have never used online – I barely use it at all; my accounting program in my computer must have been hacked! Damage control – what do I do!

I gathered all of my account information and started calling banks, brokerage houses and credit cards telling my tales of woe changing accounts and locking everything I could down. Hours and hours wasted and no more fraud found.

All of my personal data is password protected and all of my accounts have different unguessable passwords. What about my other data on my hard drive? How deep would this identity theft go?

But wait! I don’t have my CIV numbers anywhere but on the credit card itself! I never used this card online so how can so many charges be made? I have to call the credit card company again!

15 minutes on hold and the fraud department tells me that a vendor who I used the card with had a security breach - they were responsible for the loss of data not me! Boy was I relived – although I wasted a day – or did I?

What I did find was recorded instances of my social security number in correspondences saved on my hard drive (now removed) and I put all of my account numbers into my accounting program - they are now all removed.

I also realized that in some cases my identity as the owner of an account was verified with my birth date and mothers maiden name – what a huge – immense security issue!

I have spent the rest of the day changing birth dates on social media sites such as MySpace, Facebook and more to a fictitious date. There is no reason for personal information such as this to be accessible by the world and whatever skivemeisters want to hack me.

How many of you have grandparents online or a family tree somewhere that can be found? How many of you grandparents have your kids online? What about the future?

Why does the clerk at my cellphone company have the right to know my last 4 digits of my social security number along with dozens of other underpaid people? Birth date and last 4 of my social gave me access to all of my other accounts. This is insane!

I have also deleted my profile from many places and will keep doing so until almost all of them are gone. I don’t want more web sites to have my personal information that can be used against me. Though these sites may have good intentions what if they get hacked? Will they pay me for the time it takes to lock down and change all of my clients information and they trust that they will lose in me?

As for friends on social sites: I generally don’t respond to any 3rd party applications (programs that are add-ins) and "causes" - Do you really know who these people are? Are you sure they represent the organization they say they are from and what if they and real and THEY get hacked? I am removing these also as quickly as I can. I suggest anyone who reads this does as well.

We live in a totally connected world and that’s great. I just don’t want to be connected to criminals or cyber-terrorists and neither should you.

Chris H
Owner of MyCrapMail.com and tons of other crappy sites